Asked in a private meeting in June 2018 whether he thought the commander in chief was strengthening America, Mattis responded: “No, I don’t. I do not think Trump’s policies will make America stronger.” The conversation occurred after the president’s first summit meeting with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un and Trump’s subsequent decision to cancel war games with South Korea…

During the summer of 2018, Snodgrass writes, Mattis confided to then-White House chief of staff John Kelly in a secret meeting that he was quitting the Cabinet at the end of the year — making his departure far more premeditated than the supposedly abrupt resignation that Mattis would later announce in December…

“The White House is not to be trusted right now,” Mattis said in a meeting with close aides in his office in March 2018, when Trump appointees such as national security adviser H.R. McMaster, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and White House economic adviser Gary Cohn — the colloquial “adults in the room,” to the president’s detractors — were departing the administration or had been fired. “It’s too undisciplined at the moment.”